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PAGE 4—The Southern Cross, July 22. 1971
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The Consistent Ethic
In his sermon delivered last Sunday at
the Red Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral
in New York City, Archbishop Medeiros
joined in a single “life” concept three
issues now very much under discussion
on the American scene. By placing the
three issues side by side, he emphasized
their common elements and urged a
consistent approach in resolving each of
them. It was a studied and careful
presentation which should receive wide
attention and be influential in forming
the consciences of those who have
publicly expressed their concern for the
quality of life in the present human
environment.
The text began with the question of
abortion, a matter in which New York
has the dubious privilege of leadership
among the states. Life must be respected
and protected at its beginnings, at the
mement when it is most defenseless or
we cannot pretend to be its defenders at
all. The destruction of the unborn,
however, antiseptically accomplished or
well screened from public view, is an
attack on life, and lovers of life should
oppose abortion.
But it is not enough to be born, to
enter the world; the world, for its part,
must be ready to receive life, encourage
it and offer it hope for development.
This is why lovers of life must be active
in all of those areas where life is
threatened-threatened by bad housing,
lack of health care, discrimination,
unemployment and every other social ill
that assaults the dignity of man. If we
love life, we must make the good life
available to all.
At the present time life is also under
attack in war-the injured and the
casualties of Vietnam, on all sides, run
into millions. If we love life, we cannot
stand idly by and condone this
destruction ...
This urging of consistency may seem
to be the simplest of all good advice, but
it is in fact widely ignored by legions of
well-intentioned Americans. Those who
speak loudest against the loss of life in
Vietnam-with good reason-rarely raise
their voices about the mounting death in
the clinics of New York and elsewhere.
Those who struggle mightily against
social evils that destroy the quality of
life-and often with good results-are
often the same who encourage the
multiplication of death clinics in our
large cities. The reverse is, alas, too often
true as well. Those who denounced
abortion, courageously and at some cost,
are silent about Vietnam and tolerate
our multiple social ills.
The friends of life must be true
friends-from beginning to end. There is
only one life, and it cannot be attacked
without defense at one point and
protected at another. Archbishop
Medeiros has given us a timely reminder
which America neglects at its own peril.
-The Pilot, Boston, Mass. - 7/10/71
Dream For Real
(St. Anthony Messenger)
Americans.
Our needs are manifest. We must
control our nuclear weaponry, guarantee
the basic human rights of every
individual, achieve a more just
distribution of this world’s goods and
wipe out hunger and illiteracy. We must
heed Pope Paul’s cry of “No more war!”
We must keep our air breatheable and
our water drinkable.
If we are to achieve these essential
goals we cannot waste our energy,
resources and time by infighting between
young and old, Democrat and
Republican, Catholic and Protestant,
liberals and conservatives, Chinese and
Our world-sized problems are forcing
us to think of the world-sized
brotherhood that St. Paul talks about in
the Letter to the Ephesians as God’s
plan: bringing together all things in
Christ to form a new brotherhood under
His headship.
Is this unrealistic dreaming? The
teamwork in the space program shouts
out that fantastic things are possible for
men who pool their best talents and
energies to achieve a goal. What each of
us can do to better the team is worth
pondering as we watch our fellow
countrymen work together on Apollo
15.
r
Tracts For The Times
BY REV. MARVIN R. O’CONNELL
Yes, Virginia, there is a Mafia, as the
shooting recently of Joseph Colombo clearly
demonstrates. But if I were of Italian, or more
specifically of Sicilian, extraction, and
particularly if I were a Mafioso chieftain I
would sue Mario Puzo, the paisano who wrote
the best-selling novel, “The Godfather.” Mr.
Puzo purports to tell the story of a New York
Mafia Family in the years just after World War
II. The head of the clan, the “godfather” of the
title, is Don Vitto Corleone, Sicilian
immigrant turned big-time
racketeer, who is portrayed as a
combination of Scattergood Baines
and John Dillenger. Filled with
homely wisdom and a sense of
family honor, which, Mr. Puzo
alleges, pervades the hills of Sicily,
the don has risen to his position of
enormous wealth and vast political
power by as much brutality as ne deemed
necessary and, at the same time, by building up
an intricate set of alliances with other Sicilians
less powerful than he. He does them favors, and
thereby becomes their “godfather.” When he
needs a favor in return, they are bound by the
code to do it at whatever cost to themselves-or
else. So there develops the friendly,
neighborhood Mafia “family,” a kind of
independent social unit with its own values,
laws and penalties.
Don Vitto also has a blood family of three
sons, a daughter and a wife who cooks spicy
foods and goes to Mass every morning to pray
for the don and otherwise keeps out of the
way. (Catholicism, about which Mr. Puzo is
very uninformed-he gets the most elemental
things mixed up-hovers on the edge of the
story.) The don is quite disappointed in his
children. The eldest son is a stupid brute and a
sex maniac, the second frivolous and
introverted, and the youngest has repudiated
the ideals of the Family by joining the Marine
Corps and attending Dartmouth. The daughter
is a spoiled brat married to a north Italian
schlemiel who ultimately betrays the don.
When the godfather declines to go into the
narcotics business-out of a shrewd business
sense, not out of scruples-a gang war results
among the five New York “Families.” There
follows in Mr. Puzo’s book hundreds of pages
! '
i \
of people being beaten, shot, stabbed, maimed,
tortured and--oh yes, killed. The don himself is
gunned down and his eldest son shot to death
at an expressway toll booth. The Dartmouth
man retaliates by killing the enemy chief and a
crooked cop in a pizza parlor, and then just
about everybody in sight. We are treated to
accounts of a baby being burned in a furnace,
of a Negro pimp being clubbed to death with a
flashlight. We learn how to beat a wife into
whimpering hysteria without leaving any marks,
how to fracture a man’s jaw in the most painful
way possible, and how to rupture a smart-aleck
college boy. Brains spatter windshields, blood
smears the sidewalks. One bound and gagged
hostage is executed by chopping off first his
feet, then his legs at the knees, then at the hips,
while a second hostage, watching this
performance, suffocates by swallowing his gag.
If this sort of sadism in print is your bag,
then “The Godfather” is for you. Of if you like
fantasy sex--in the tradition of Harold
Robbins-look no further. But if you are
looking for art, for truth, for insight, Mr. Puzo
can’t help you. He is a very lousy writer. He
presents characters only to have them do things
those characters, as he has created them, would
not do. He is a Sicilian Mickey Spillane whose
novel is simply a vehicle for titillation. He has
neither the wit nor the wisdom to tell us a real
story about real people, even about real
gangsters. He got lost somewhere among the
beatings and the orgies.
Which raises a crucial question: why do we
read such stuff and thus make a panderer like
Mr. Puzo rich? How in the name of education
can high school teachers of literature
(literature!) require their students to read “The
Godfather?” I suppose the answer is that our
canons of taste have fallen to new lows since
the advent of mass television. Mr. Puzo
entertains us-and his book is entertaining in a
perverse way-as TV drama does, without asking
us to think or judge. The secret of “The
Godfather” is the swiftness with which it
moves. It engages and diverts us: when Rocco
shoots Carlo in the belly we know that Rocco
will in turn get his and we whip through the
pages to see in what ghastly way it will happen.
Mr. Puzo’s generation of novelists has learned
that the reading public prefers
vividness-blood-red living color-to genuine
literary quality.
(
King Herod Applauds
It Seems To Me
J
Joseph Breiu
The case of the New York
Times, the Washington Post
and the “Pentagon papers”
does not seem to me to be
nearly as simple and onesided
as the communications
media, jubilating over their
Supreme Court “victory,”
represented it to be.
8 One aspect
generally
ignored is the
question of
the moral-and
maybe legal-
the newspa
pers in accept
ing documents
secretly lifted from
government files in violation
of the solemn commitment of
a trusted employe. Should
that sort of thing be
encouraged? Nay-should it
be hailed as a great blow for
freedom of the press? Should
the person who lifted the
papers be heroized?-and the
newspapers for using them?
Let’s put the shoe on the
other foot for a moment. Let
us ask the owners and
managers of the Times and
the Post: “What would be
your reaction if, in some
celebrated case, one of your
trusted librarians rifled your
files and handed your
guarded background material
to a rival communications
medium? Would you praise
the librarian, and would you
lionize the competing
medium if it proceeded to use
your documents instead of
returning them to you?”
I do not think it would be
a sufficient answer for the
Times and the Post to reply
that they are private
institutions whereas the
government belongs to all the
people. They have a highly
public function and a grave
public responsibility; and
anyhow, betrayal of a trust is
betrayal of a trust no matter
who is betrayed.
It is alleged that far too
many government documents
are marked “top secret.”
Doubtless that is true; but
does the fact justify betrayal
of trust and acceptance of
pilfered papers? Again, it is
claimed that after all, the
documents weren’t really all
that secret. If so, why did the
Times and the Post make
such a great thing out of
publishing them, and out of
denouncing the government
for not publishing them?
The shoe on the other
foot... Let us turn to the
case of Frank Stanton,
president of the Columbia
Broadcasting System. A
committee of Congress
investigated charges that
statements of certain persons,
used in a broadcast called
“The Selling of the
Pentagon,” had been
changed, distorted and even
reversed in meaning through
electronic editing-manipula
tion. The committee asked
Stanton to produce, for
examination, all the tapes
used in producing the
documentary.
Stanton refused, and was
heroized by the
communications media,
including the newspapers, for
so doing. The media alleged
that the tapes were private
documents-secret
documents-and that the
public had no right to
examine them. We can easily
imagine the enraged uproar in
the newspapers and the other
media if an employe of CBS
had stolen the tapes and
handed them to the
congressional committee. The
employe would have been
castigated for making off
with the tapes, and Congress
would have been condemned
for accepting and using them.
Seems to me the media are
guilty of the double standard
of morality which we
characterize with the words,
“Depends on whose ox gets
gored.”
/ \
The
Yardstick
V J
Msgr. George G. Higgins
Director, Division of Urban Life, UJS.C.C.
(H)enry (H)iggins’ famous question, “Why
can’t women be like a man?” was thought (even
by some women) to be rather funny when Tf
was first put to music in “My Fair Lady.” Since
the advent of Women’s Lib, however, a mere
man would have to be rather foolhardy to ask
the same question in mixed company. He
would be held up to wrathful scorn (even by his
male peers) as an insensitive male chauvinist,
and by today’s standards, of course, that’s
almost as bad as being called a fascist pig. In
other words, male bigotry, once so respectable,
is now verboten in polite society.
There is another, more elite form of bigotry,
however, which is still very respectable and very
“chic” in upper and upper-middle-class society
in this country. Michael Lerner, a young
journalist turned political scientist, described it
not so long ago as follows: “An extraordinary
amount of bigotry on the part of elite, liberal
students goes unexamined....Directed at the
lower middle class, it feeds on the unexamined
biases of class perspective, the personality
predilictions of elite radicals and academic
disciples that support their views....
“In general (Mr. Lerner continued) the
bigotry of a lower-middle-class policeman
toward a ghetto black, or of a
lower-middle-class mayor toward a rioter, is not
viewed in the same perspective as the bigotry of
an upper-middle-class peace matron toward a
lower-middle-class mayor, or an upper-class
university student toward an Italian, a Pole or
National Guardsman from Cicero, Illinois-that
is, if the latter two cases are called bigotry at
all.. „ Yet the two bigotries are very similar.”
Mr. Lerner says that the hidden
liberal-radical bigotry toward the
lower-middle-class is “stinking and covered”
and argues that its consequences are tragic.
“Not until the upper-middle class learns to deal
with its own hidden bigotry,” he concludes,
“will it be in a position to help destroy
lower-middle-class bigotry as well.”
(“Respectable Bigotry,” The American Scholar,
Autumn 1969)
During the two years which have elapsed
since Mr. Lerner wrote the searing indictment
of upper-class bigotry, the popular media and
number of independent scholars representing a
variety of disciplines have, at long last,
discovered Middle America and are trying, with
mixed results, to find out what the millions of
ordinary people who comprise this vast
segment of American society actually like, what
they are thinking at the present time, and what
it is that really makes them tick. Of the many
articles and books which have been written
about Middle America during this short period
of time, the best, in my opinion, are those
which bear the name of Robert Coles.
Dr. Coles is a practicing psychiatrist with a
profoundly sensitive social conscience and a
wide-ranging grasp of the social sciences. He has
spent the better part of the last five years
interviewing-and thereby getting to know and
respect and even to love-a generous sampling of
middle and lower-middle class Americans. His
most recent book “The Middle Americans,”
(the text of which is supplemented by a series
of excellent photographs by Jon Erikson) is the
perfect antidote to the upper-class bigotry so
severely criticized by Mr. Lerner in the article
referred to above.
Dr. Coles does not pretend to have written a
scientific sociological study in the technical
sense of the word. He and His collaborator, Mr.
Erikson, look upon themselves, “as observers,
that alone.” Their task has been to see and
hear, in so far as they could, “how certain
families live, families headed by men who are
policemen, firemen, factory workers, bank
tellers, or lower-level bank officers, school
teachers, telephone repairmen, construction
workers, clerics and typists and small farmers
and small storekeepers and on and on.
What they have seen and heard has
compelled them to realize that any attempt to
stereotype Middle Americans into a single
monolithic mold would be tragically wide of
the mark. Again and again, Dr. Coles reports,
they have come to realize “how
various-wonderfully so, confusingly so-the
human beings we here call ‘Middle Americans’
can turn out to be.”
The aim of their book, then, is to make the
“human actuality” of Middle America come
across to the reader. In this writer’s judgment,
they have succeeded in doing so to a
remarkable degree. They have portrayed Middle
America with sympathy and love-the kind of
love that can understand, even though it
disapproves of, the bigotry and the other
human faults and failures of ordinary men and
women.
Dr. Coles and Mr. Erikson, in other words,
are totally free of snobbery and
self-righteousness. Their purpose “is not to
criticize these people (Middle Americans), argue
with them, praise them as America’s answer to
anything and everything, or use them as a
means of advancing certain values or purposes
we happen to have.” They simply accept
Middle Americans as fellow human beings with
the same mixture of virtue and vice which
characterizes every other segment of American
society, including upper and upper-middle class
students and intellectuals.
It is this quality of humaneness-the quality
of tolerance and sympathetic
understanding-which makes their book
required reading for the liberal critics of Middle
America. One has the impression, incidentally,
that Dr.- Coles and Mr. Erikson wrote their
marvelous human book primarily for the
instruction of the so-call liberals.
It is their hope that the liberals will not, ‘Tn
(Continued on page 5)